


Vessel

by josephina_x



Series: Magic, Mayhem, and Madness [1]
Category: Smallville
Genre: (actually no I'm not really :-P ), (sorry about that), (tags will make more sense once I get the next two fics up...), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Ghosts, Halloween, Mental Disintegration, Mental Instability, Mind Control, Possession, Rituals, Season/Series 02, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 11:43:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lana has a bad idea. Lex goes along with it because he figures Clark would be sad if he didn't. And then Lex suffers for it because Clark doesn't believe him, he tries to fix things on his own, and he gets in over his head...</p><p>Original Prompt: "After Lana talks Lex into letting her hold a seance at the mansion strange things start to happen. Sudden noises, items moving, voices in the night. Clark dismisses Lex's concerns, joking that the billionaire is acting like a scared girl. That is until Lex starts getting hurt."</p><p>Written for the Clexmas Super Sexy Scary 2012 Challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Thursday, October 31, 2002 -- Halloween, Samhain, The Witching Hours

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Vessel  
>  **Author:** [josephina_x](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com)  
>  **Summary:** Lana has a bad idea. Lex goes along with it because he figures Clark would be sad if he didn't. And then Lex suffers for it because Clark doesn't believe him, he tries to fix things on his own, and he gets in over his head...  
>  **Category:** fic  
>  **Rating:** PG-13  
>  **Word Count** 18,400+  
>  **Spoilers:** through Season 2x06 Redux, explicitly, and takes place shortly thereafter; general for the entire series  
>  **Original Prompt:** #2 -- After Lana talks Lex into letting her hold a seance at the mansion strange things start to happen. Sudden noises, items moving, voices in the night. Clark dismisses Lex's concerns, joking that the billionaire is acting like a scared girl. That is until Lex starts getting hurt.  
>  **Warnings:** no standard warnings apply (non-con abduction/mind-control if you squint real hard and read between the lines; it's no worse than the actual show ever was)  
>  **Author's Notes:** Unofficial beta work by [fruitbat00](http://fruitbat00.livejournal.com). Any mistakes or screw-ups that remain contained within are mine and mine alone, this I so swear.
> 
> Written for the Clexmas Super Sexy Scary 2012 Challenge.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex felt a little bemused -- and a little off-put -- by all this. He really would have thought that Lana's first recourse for learning more about her dead parents -- and possibly-alive father -- would have been something more practical. After all, Lana had a photograph to work from and Chloe Sullivan had every yearbook the local high school had put out digitized by this point -- an image search would do it. And, if that failed, certainly there were gossipy Smallvillan old biddies that Lana could talk with, couldn't she? It wasn't as if the closed-mouthed Nell Potter was the only person she could ask.

But no.

Instead she wanted to hold a seance at his mansion. To talk to her dead parents.

Lex found this disturbing on many levels.

First and foremost was the fact -- which he'd learned from Clark in passing awhile ago -- that Lana talked to her dead parents at the cemetery already, so why she would want to hold the seance _here_ in the house _where he lived_ instead of where she _usually_ tried to talk with them was beyond him.

Second, and not least, was the fact that she'd barely missed being embroiled in the middle of yet another Smallville-ian nightmare, this time in the form of a meteor-freak who sucked the life out of people and turned them into old, withered husks, and when she had not gotten enough 'youth' to hold her over, had herself disintegrated into graveyard dust -- something he'd also learned from Clark in passing this week.

Third, and not last by a longshot, was the fact that the Talon was expected to have a full house all-day, and it was hosting its own festivities tonight along with the rest of the town. As co-owner and not-silent-partner, Lana should have been there and directing said festivities.

Oh, and it was Halloween.

And Lex's blind father was probably wandering about the drafty old castle someplace, and that was both a mood-setter and a deal-breaker.

And with Lex's luck, they'd either get Lionel, or Lex's own mother -- or, god-help-him, _his dead little brother_ \-- haunting said seance-ish "festivities" that Lana wanted to have. In his house. On Halloween. At midnight.

This was not cool. Lex was not okay with this.

Lex thought of voicing some, if not all, of these very valid concerns to the young teenage girl he was facing down at present, except she had a very determined and almost mad gleam in her eye of the sort that vaguely and sickeningly reminded Lex of a few meteor freaks in his time in town, and so he kept his damn fool mouth shut and lived to see another day.

He hoped.

This was assuming he survived the night, first. She'd sprung it on him at the last minute, probably wise to the idea that Lex might try to come up with a way to absent himself from the proceedings, or otherwise find an excuse to leave town and skip out on the mess that was quite probably going to go the way of all things Smallville-ian and turn into one horrendous meteor-rock "enhanced" _nightmare_ that would try to eat his face.

Or concuss him, tie him up, wait for him to wake up again, and _then_ try to eat his face, with hopefully a timely last-minute save from Clark at some point in there.

Or worse. There could be yelling from Clark afterwards. That would make it worse.

So would a no-show from Clark.

\--Again, _not cool._

Lex ground his teeth in frustration. The things he did for Clark. Up to and including keeping his pined-after potential-girlfriend-to-be happy ...or, well, _something_ like it. Lex had already had someone do the initial groundwork for her, discovering that her parents had been separated for about a year at one point, and who the man was -- Henry Small -- at Lana's inital request. He'd even warned her that she might not like what he might find. So why couldn't she take it from there? On her own?

Lex managed to shoo his father out of the mansion for the night to some Metropolis party or another. The rest of the staff he gave the night off and _strongly_ suggested to vacate the premises by the expedient method of informing them of the many spectacles in town that they could partake in, instead of 'hanging about' the castle after-hours. He was hoping for a minimum of casualties in his house that evening. ...Except for maybe him, because these sorts of things tended to end with him getting concussed or otherwise tossed about, which was decidedly Not Fun in his book.

If -- _when_ \-- this went badly, he was getting a written apology from somebody. In thick card stock and gold-embossed ink. So help him god.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lana was back at 8pm with a carload of "supplies". She said she wanted to "set things up properly."

Lex found her a good room for it, all armor and weapons and odd hangings and devices, and was promptly told that the library was the perfect room and that they was doing it in there instead.

Lex thought about arguing with her over it. He paused to order his thoughts, framed his disapproval as a thoughful and suggestive aside rather than as an outright refusal, then finally took in her body language -- feet planted, hands on her hips, chin raised -- and reflected upon her rather belligerent stance.

...He wished her well, and a Happy Halloween.

And then he got the hell out of the way.

Until she found him around 11:48pm or so, hiding in the winecellar, drinking heavily, and corralled him into the library.

It got worse. It seemed "they" _hadn't_ meant "Clark and Lana" -- apparently _Lex_ was the only one 'invited along' to the proceedings that night.

It was Lex and Lana, all alone in the mansion, trying to talk to Lana's dead parents' ghosts.

Yeah. This was going to go well.

At Lana's insistence, Lex lowered himself to the floor on the opposite side of the Ouija board and arranged himself in a kneeling posture, on the premise that he would be able to get to his feet or roll out of the way more quickly from such a posture if -- _when_ \-- they were attacked. It was a Smallville surety.

He contemplated getting the hell out of there and leaving Lana alone to it, but then he had a vision of the sort of disappointed look Clark would give him when he heard about Lana's dead, dessicated corpse -- or whatever state she would be found in the next morning -- if Lex didn't stay and try to keep from getting her killed. The really, _really_ **disappointed** one.

...Argh. The things he did for Clark!

So instead of doing the smart thing and running away like he should have done if he had had any sense at all, Lex stayed where he was and glanced around the room suspiciously at the creeping shadows. Lana had had him turn off all the power in the building -- not just flick off a mere lightswitch or two -- because the electricity apparently might interfere with the 'dead reception'. The only light they had was from two lit candles -- one that Lana was holding, and one that Lex had been given.

Lana held hers daintily. Lex clutched his like a weapon. He'd never really had anything against the dark. It was just that it tended to herald things to come. Surprises. Nasty ones.

No, he had no issue with darkness. He'd always had more of a problem with the things that tended to _lurk within it_.

Lana pulled out a book and started reading aloud from it, lighting a few more candles around them as she went. She set down her candle, burned incense in a bowl, tossed more herbs onto the fire, the spoken words becoming a strange non-melodious chant...

Lex heard the clock chime once...

twice...

three times...

The sound seemed to echo in his head.

He blinked fuzzily, confused, and swayed. Odd. He hadn't thought himself quite _that_ drunk...

His head felt like there was a pressure all around it, within it, but now it felt a little overwhelming, and he slowly let it drop. His hearing narrowed to the clock chimes, which at first sounded rather quiet, but seemed to grow louder and louder at each strike, until they were drowning out the sound of Lana's voice.

His breathing slowed to the speed of the long, deep, sonorous chimes and his vision narrowed, growing ever more dim, and he vaguely realized that it was because his eyelids, suddenly too-heavy, were becoming increasingly harder and harder to keep open. And he was having trouble caring. He couldn't remember why he was here...

He frowned as he felt a sudden chill.

His hands loosened and he barely felt the candle slip from his fingers, hardly sensed the little flickering light vanish red-to-nothing behind closed eyes when it fell to the floor and went out.

He didn't hear Lana's startled complaint.

The clock struck twelve.

~*~*~*~*~*~

And then Lex woke up in his bed.

Flat on his back, he blinked up at the ceiling.

Sunlight was streaming in the windows between the curtains. It was the next morning.

He couldn't remember the time that had passed in the interim.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	2. Friday, November 1, 2002 -- All Saints, Some Sinners, No Small Confusion

~*~*~*~*~*~

He got himself up -- fully clothed still, in what he had been wearing the day before -- and groaned as he raised a shaky hand to his head.

Ugh. He winced at the throbbing in his head as he stalled sitting up on the edge of his bed.

He debated the merits of trying to stand (not very) versus just lying back down again (because his head hadn't felt so bad before).

...He couldn't remember when -- if? -- Lana had left.

He couldn't remember what had happened to Lana.

Lex clenched his jaw, then relaxed it as the aching in his head got worse, and slowly stood up.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex stared down and around at the mess strewn across the library floor.

It looked like Lana hadn't cleaned up from the night before.

...It didn't _seem_ like there'd been any sign of a struggle.

He frowned as he skirted the semicircular mess and slowly crouched down and picked up a book. The book Lana had been reading from.

The book Lana had said she'd found in an old trunk of her mother's things up in her aunt's attic when he'd asked, along with that old photograph he'd helped her research.

Lex knew a thing or two about having a dead parent's things in one's possession, and it was this: you didn't give them up easily.

You didn't give them up for _anything_.

Lex carefully set the book back down in the exact same position where he'd found it, then stood and found his housekeeper. He informed her to let everyone know not to touch a thing in the library and not to let his father into the room -- or anyone else for that matter, not without Lex's say-so -- but didn't he elaborate past that. Hopefully that would be enough for now.

As far as he was concerned, it was a crime scene.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex slowly slid out of his car in front of the Talon and walked up to the door.

It only occurred to him as he stepped inside the coffee shop that maybe he ought to have called the police first-thing, up at the mansion, letting them comb the place. Why hadn't he done that? Her car hadn't been there, but her abductor could have easily moved her in it. He wanted to know what had happened, where Lana was now, and that would have been the most expedient way to find--

\--Lana. Was behind the counter up at the coffee bar.

Lex felt his shoulders fall slightly as he relaxed completely. ...Ah. So _that_ was what relief felt--

Ow.

What?

Lex swore he must be missing a small chunk of time, except for the fact that when he revisited the previous ten seconds or so, he could remember perfectly well what they had contained: a Lana looking over at him, a Lana suddenly looking completely irate, a Lana stomping around the bar and right up to him where he stood, and that very same Lana--

He slowly brought a hand up to his burning cheek where she'd slapped him, hard.

He blinked down at her, feeling like his life could not get any more surreal, as she _glared_ up at him, and his head was pounding, and _what did he do last night--?_

"I'm sorry," Lex said numbly, blinking down at her in blank confusion.

"You should be!" Lana complained, and she looked angry as hell and... close to tears. "How could you!?! Why did you do it?!"

"...I don't know," Lex said, because truthfully he couldn't remember what he'd done, other than let her into the mansion and get dragged along into whatever plans she'd had, and he wasn't even entirely sure anymore why he'd even gone that far to begin with.

"Just-- Just _go_ , I... I can't even look at you right now, I..." Lana said, teary-eyed as she wrapped her arms around herself, inconsolable as she turned and walked away.

Lex stared after her, feeling a little dazed.

Then he twitched slightly as a disturbing feeling hit him all-at-once... perhaps best described as what it might feel like to have the entire population of the town staring at him accusingly in vituperative anger, how dare he hurt the feelings of their little fairy princess--

Lex tried not to hunch his shoulders and bow under the sudden pressure. He did turn around and walk out of the building.

When he got to the outside landing he felt a vague lost restlessness, and stared off into the middle distance at nothing. He barely kept himself from just wandering off aimlessly, staying still standing where he was as he tried to think, he didn't really know what to do next, where to go... He knew he had something he had to do, he must, he just couldn't... what was it...?

After a while, he felt a hand press down gently on his shoulder and he sat straight down on the top step.

"Here," he heard, and he reflexively took the water bottle held out to him.

He glanced over to his side as the person attached to the hand in question sat down next to him--

Oh. Chloe.

"You look like hell," he was informed. "Did you sleep in those clothes?"

Lex glanced down and realized he hadn't changed them before he'd left the mansion. "Yes," he said simply, fingering his shirt buttons with his free hand.

"I've never seen you look less than composed before," Chloe said, eyeing him. "And you look like you've got the headache of the century going. How much did you drink last night?"

"It wasn't the alcohol," Lex muttered, staring down at the bottle of water. He was sure of that at least. He didn't _have_ blackouts on alcohol. _Just_ alcohol...

Chloe sighed, grabbed the bottle back from him, twisted the top off, and then handed it right back. "Drink it already," she told him.

Lex lifted it to his lips, then gasped and dropped it from nerveless fingers.

"Jesus!" Chloe cursed, jumping down the steps after the bouncing plastic bottle. She finally grabbed it again as it rolled to a stop on the concrete sidewalk, having spilled almost the entirely of its contents in its travels. "Lex, what the hell--?" she exclaimed, looking back up at him.

"Nothing, I'm fine, sorry," he said quickly, shaking as he used the railing to pull himself back to his feet.

"You're white as a sheet--" Chloe said, frowning as she walked back up the steps.

Lex twitched and moved sideways away from Chloe as she started to reach for him.

"I'm fine," he repeated. "I need to get to work," he said automatically, and blinked as he finally remembered -- work. The place he had to be. Yes.

It was a Friday. Lana and Chloe might have classes off for a three-day weekend, but he had work he had to do. LexCorp needed him.

He nearly staggered down the steps and over to his car. He got in, turned the keys, and drove off.

He told himself that he could not _possibly_ have heard what he'd thought he had right before he put the bottle to his lips. It was ludicrous. His mind was playing tricks on him. He hadn't heard a familiar, so familiar -- _too_ familiar, yet elusive -- a familiar, _trusted_ voice softly whisper in his ear--

_"It's poison."_

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex felt twitchy all day, feeling as though someone -- or some _thing_ \-- was looking over his shoulder and dogging his steps all around the factory, but he managed to wrestle some composure back over the course of the day and he got through it.

When he got back to the mansion, Clark was there waiting for him.

He didn't look happy.

...Well, neither was Lex.

"Something I can help you with?" Lex asked as he got out of his car and slammed the door closed.

Clark crossed his arms.

"Let me guess; Lana talked to you?" Lex offered, moving past Clark and into the mansion.

"No," Clark said as he dropped his arms, turning and following Lex in. "She wouldn't talk to me at all. What's going on?"

"I don't know," Lex said thinly, making his way down the hallway towards the library, tossing his car keys into the usual dish on a side table as he went.

"You apologized to Lana!" Clark accused.

Lex sighed. Chloe must've filled him in on what little she'd heard. "Because she was obviously upset. That doesn't mean that I remember what happened," Lex admitted, none-to-happy about where this conversation was leading.

"You-- what?!" That seemed to bring Clark up short.

They both came to a stop in front of the library doors.

"I remember everything up until the stroke of midnight," Lex explained patiently, pulling out his house keys and shoving the correct one in the lock.

"And then?" Clark prompted.

"And then --nothing. I woke up in bed," Lex informed him, and with an audible click the lock came open.

"You locked the library?" Clark said, frowning.

"Yes," Lex explained, pocketing the key. "I thought it prudent to restrict access this morning, given the circumstances. Lana wanted to hold a seance at the mansion last night."

"On Halloween?"

"At midnight, and yes, I am well-aware of what a bad idea it was, especially in this town," Lex said darkly, "but she seemed determined. I thought it would be better," he grimaced, " _\--safer_ to let her have it _here_ ," he motioned at the closed doors, "than risk her deciding to run off and do it elsewhere on her own, some place more open-air and less defensible like the cemetery." He left out how he hadn't thought that would have meant him having to join in the 'festivities'.

"You should have called me!" Clark said angrily.

Lex shoved the library doors open and strode in, looking behind him at Clark. "There was no time; she pulled me into it at the last minute. I had thought she had invited you and Chloe--" he began with a glare, then at Clark's wide-eyed look past him, turned to survey the room himself and came to a dead halt.

Son of a bitch.

What the hell had happened?

"Lex, what did you _do?_ " Clark asked, stunned, and Lex clenched his jaw.

"I didn't do this," he said, angry in the extreme. "It wasn't like this before. I expressly forbade any of the staff from coming in here, or letting anyone else in."

The room was a _wreck_. Books wrenched from bookcases. Couches overturned. Cushions slashed. His desk, shattered. Pool table upended. Anything that had been on a raised flat surface was now on the floor, most of it smashed; anything not bolted down had been flung or shoved over.

And, in the center of the room, the only things left untouched -- the remnants of the seance from the night before.

 _That_ had been left exactly as it was, as it had been this morning, as if to **mock** him.

Heads would roll for this.

Lex spun on a heel and stomped out of the room in search of his housekeeper.

~*~*~*~*~*~

By the time he was done speaking with his house staff, the mansion was in an uproar, and Lex's headache had resumed with a vengeance.

No-one confessed to the damage, and if the looks on his staff's faces were any indication, they'd been as genuinely shocked and appalled at the state of the room as he. Building security had been just as flummoxed.

But that hadn't stopped any of them from accusing each other and opening the floodgates to all the petty grievances that had been building since they'd all first began to serve the mansion and the Luthors' needs.

It took Lex hours to straighten out, with Clark frowning on, and by the time Lex _mostly_ had it settled, he sent them all home with thinly-veiled disgust.

And while his own people hadn't picked up on the last, Clark sure as hell had.

"Don't," Lex gritted out as he passed Clark on the way back to the library. "Just-- don't."

"I didn't say anything," Clark said noncommittally, but Lex had felt the judgmental disapproving unvoiced criticism emanating at him in waves from across the room for hours. He squared his shoulders, clenched his jaw, and didn't respond, didn't deign to even acknowledge the response.

" _Lex_ ," Clark said, following him. He sounded almost wounded.

"Seriously, Clark -- I am not in the mood for one of Jonathan's holier-than-thou lectures delivered via _your_ mouth," Lex spat out.

He turned at Clark's silence and saw that he'd stopped in the middle of the hallway, staring at Lex in shock.

"What?" Lex said, throwing his hands out to the sides.

"Are you... all right?" Clark said, eyeing him with something like censure, but maybe approaching concern.

"I'm fine," he said in clipped tones, flinging his hands up at the ceiling. "Why wouldn't I be fine?" He turned and resumed his travel, shoving his way into the library through the doors that apparently were just there for decoration and not meant to actually keep anything out.

"...You got slapped and yelled at by Lana this morning for something you don't know anything about, your library is wrecked and it's your favorite room in the whole place, and your house staff just put on a reenactment of Lord of the Flies in the kitchen?" Clark said with an audible frown.

Lex sighed, and he let his shoulders slump as he looked over the library and was greeted again by the same disastrous mess as before.

"Lex?"

He scrubbed at his face and muttered, "It looked better than this after the tornado hit." He wasn't joking, either -- in his opinion, it really _had_.

It was Clark's turn to sigh. Lex felt a large, gentle hand on his shoulder and turned to look up at Clark.

"What happened, Lex? Really?"

"I don't--"

"--remember what happened after midnight, yeah, I know, but what happened before that?"

Lex fought the urge to lean up against Clark and whine out all his woes. This was not an after school special, and he wasn't a teenager.

Instead, he strode forward, reached down, and scooped up Lana's book, then walked over to the fireplace and sat down in front of it -- the area in front of the hearth being one of the few clear spots in the room.

"What's that?" Clark asked.

"It's the book Lana was reading from," Lex said, flipping it open. "I didn't get a chance to look at it earlier. She was the one who conducted the ritual."

"...'Conducted the ritual'?" Clark echoed, sounding highly skeptical. "You believe in... magic? ...And ghosts and stuff?"

Lex glanced over at Clark as his friend sat down next to him. "I'm Catholic. Mysticism is practically in our blood. We're the ones who conducted all the various Inquisitions, which also set off the later Reformation witch-trials, you know. There are priests that still go around performing exorcisms to this day." He shook his head as he put his nose back down into the book. "It'd be hypocritical as hell if we didn't believe in those sorts of things being possible, but still went around smiting people for them." He frowned. "Although technically that was a very big about-face after centuries of denying any such thing, the original official stance being that witches and the like didn't exist at all."

"You _agree_ with all that stuff?" Clark sounded shocked.

"No, not really," Lex waved off casually. "Fighting off the devils and demons of sin, yes. Acting like a bunch of scared, easily-duped children and hurting people for no good reason, no. There were so many falsely accused for no reason other than the petty spite and hatred of a neighbor, and executed due to a simple paralyzing fear of the unknown infecting the rest. I don't doubt that any true threat would have merely disappeared into the wilds without ever being caught, or killed anyone who opposed them if cornered, if they really had that sort of power."

Clark shifted uneasily.

"Some of the worst probably would have done some of the accusing themselves and gleefully watched the mob rule do their work for them... or had been pulling the strings leading up to the bloodbath from behind the scenes in the first place. But history is history. Just because we're American doesn't mean we still support Manifest Destiny, believing it's an acceptable practice to kill Native Americans for their land, thinking it's our God-given right to do so. Even if most of our American ancestors used to think that way, we certainly don't have to do so today, to ourselves be considered American," Lex shrugged. "But in order to understand things as they are now, a person needs to know what came before, and why, and what has changed in the interim."

"...So you don't agree with that, with the witch hunts, and... hurting people who are-- who have different beliefs, even if they might be... more..." Clark said slowly, and it sounded like more of a careful question than anything.

"Well, no," Lex said, surprised and a little taken aback that Clark might believe he felt otherwise. "I'm very live-and-let-live when it comes to religion, so long as no-one's getting hurt. I'm somewhat of a lapsed-faith Catholic, and more of a Humanist these days, or at least I'm trying to be," Lex said with a wry smile.

Clark frowned. "...A Humanist?" he said, finally.

"Well, I'm certainly not an Epicurean!" Lex laughed, then caught the confused look on Clark's face. "Ah, I take it you haven't had any classes on religion, mythology, and alternate belief systems in school yet."

"Uh, no," said Clark.

"Well, if you get the chance, and have a thick enough skin, I'd recommend it," Lex said. "The subject is _fascinating_. There are many parallels that say some very telling things about what humanity in general has in common, when it comes to the idea of gods and worship, and what sorts of forms belief can take, and usually does." He smiled over at his younger friend. "Considering how you haven't gotten all huffily offended at anything I've said yet, or called me a blasphemer, you might be able to handle it." He tilted his head and asked, "What faith do you ascribe to, by the way, if any?" He'd really never thought to ask before. Clark had always seemed to act according to Christian ideals, but, well, one never knew.

"I'm, uh, Methodist, I guess," Clark said. "We're kind of known for not, uh, burning people alive and yelling at them about going to hell and stuff."

"True enough these days," Lex agreed. "But John Wesley, the founder of that denomination, strongly believed in the existence of witches and witchcraft, to the point that he was known for saying that refusing to believe in witches was rejecting the Christian bible, because the bible said they existed: 'Thou shall not suffer a witch to live'. ...Of course, that was a mistranslation in the King James Version; in the original Hebrew the word 'm'khashepah' that was misrepresented as meaning 'witch' was actually referring to someone who could call down death-curses on people and animals. But I digress: Wesley was a bit of a literalist and saw the Good Book as sacrosanct, rather than possibly flawed, contradictory, and full of parables," Lex told him as an aside.

Clark seemed really shocked at the former, and then belatedly shocked at the latter.

"Wait, you mean all that stuff about Creationists and stuff... people are serious about that?" Clark said.

Lex almost laughed at the look on Clark's face. He settled for a nod and a, "Yes, Clark. Deathly serious."

Clark winced again.

Lex smirked to himself as he paged through the book, trying to find something with familiar hallmarks similar to what Lana had performed the previous night. "You know, Catholicism isn't actually that far off from paganism. We stole or otherwise tried to integrate all the old pagan rites into our own beliefs, way back when; moved around our original celebratory dates a bit, even. Halloween somewhat overlaps the old Celtic festival of Samhain, which in turn also overlaps All Saint's Day on November 1st, with All Soul's Day following. The Latin American El Dia De Los Muertos -- the Day of the Dead -- spans the latter two, but has its origins more in the Aztec festival dedicated to their goddess of the afterlife, Mictecacihuatl, than the Christian one, and the modern celebrations are supposedly believed to be presided over by her as well, even by the practicing Christians taking part in them."

"...Seriously?" he heard Clark blurt out.

"Seriously," Lex agreed with a quick pleased grin as he flicked through another few pages, not seeing anything promising. "Of course, there are all the other small bits -- the statues of the Virgin Mary, burning incense and praying at the small altars, and all the minor saints meant to act as intermediaries instead of going direct-to-source. Purgatory and Limbo, to go along with Heaven and Hell. None of that is in any version of the Bible that I know of," Lex said with some amusement. "And it's really not that much of a stretch to think of it as praying to minor household gods of hearth and home, or for safe travels, or to those in charge of a particular stretch of land, to see it as appeasement instead of a request for more of a helping hand. The early priests tended to use the opposite argument to convert pagans, after all."

"Geez, Lex," Clark said, sounding kind of freaked out.

"Well, they had to come up with _something_ ," Lex said. "I still think it's funny that we have our own golden calves and idols and statues that we pray to, in the form of the Virgin Mary and the various saints, but _they're_ all considered all right, because _they're_ sanctioned by the Catholic Dioceses," Lex chuckled.

Clark winced next to him and shifted uneasily.

Lex's grin widened. "Of course, if you want to get _literal_ about it, the commandment is 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me', implying both the existence of other, apparently lesser gods, and the possibility that worshipping them might be perfectly all right, so long as the jealous Christian god always gets precedence--"

"Geez, Lex!" Clark yelped.

Lex laughed. "Well, there is a reason why the seven deadly sins tend to revolve around human failings like pride, vanity, or gluttony. Self-worship is the worst, when it comes to religion and usefulness to society." He shrugged, and paused to look up at Clark. "There's a reason why all those parables about farmers doing good work and elevating themselves and their families don't generally involve punishment. Enlightened self-interest isn't frowned upon, so long as one isn't getting above one's lowly earthly station," he winked.

Clark rolled his eyes. "I think most of those parables were supposed to be more about the sons than the fathers, Lex," he complained.

"Mm, maybe," Lex said, eyeing him and wondering how much of the Council-of-Trent-approved Christian Bible Clark had actually read.

"I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about stuff like that before, though," Clark accused him.

"Well, how often do you attend church?" Lex asked lightly, while knowing full-well that no priest, pastor, rabbi, or imam he'd ever heard of would talk about things in those terms.

"Um," said Clark.

"Get enough sermons from Jonathan as it is, hm?" Lex smirked.

"What is with you today!" Clark exploded.

Lex frowned over at him, letting his fingers fall lax on the pages.

"You're acting all..." Clark looked frustrated.

"All what, Clark?"

"Straightforward."

Lex blinked at him.

"Well, you are!" Clark said. "I mean, I know you don't really like my dad, and you think he's full of... well, you _really_ don't like him," Clark said, frowning, "But you never say it straight out."

"...This is a bad thing?" Lex said.

"It's just..." Clark ran his hands through his hair. "You usually come at it sideways. You never say it like _that_." He glowered at Lex. "And you never make it into a joke, or a really bad put-down. --I don't like it when you do that," Clark informed him.

"He's unreasonable," Lex said simply.

"You think I don't know that?" Clark said, sounding frustrated in the extreme. "It's not like I can do anything about it!" He tucked his arms around his torso and looked away. "I really don't need it coming and going from the _both_ of you. It's bad enough as it is. I get enough of him sniping at you around me as it is. I don't need _you_ doing it, too."

Lex blinked at him. "He lectures you... about _me?_ " he said incredulously.

"He doesn't like it that we're friends," Clark said, throwing his hands up.

Lex gave him an odd look. "How long has he been doing this?"

"Practically since we met."

"...Given how ineffective it's proved to be so far, you'd think he'd have stopped by now," Lex muttered.

Clark gave him an askance look.

"...I don't think that's how it works, Lex," he said after a long pause.

Lex shrugged absently. "If you say s-- ah, here we are!" he exclaimed happily. He checked a few pages ahead, then nodded, flipped them back, opened the book fully and held it out between them.

"...'For the thinning of the veil between this world and the next'?" Clark read off, frowning.

"Classic reference to ghosts and the afterlife," Lex explained.

Clark skimmed down the list of 'ingredients'. "What's this thing about 'a spiritual medium to facilitate communication'?"

Lex pointed to the Ouija board in the middle of the room.

"Oh," said Clark. "Seems kind of tacky." He made a face. "Those things are supposed to let people talk to angry ghosts, right? Think somebody put meteor rock in it to try and amp it up a notch so it could wreck the room?" he half-joked, then paused.

Lex looked at Clark. Clark looked at Lex.

They shoved the book to the side and spent the next half-hour checking over the props for meteor rock.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was frustrated as hell.

"...How is there no meteor rock in _any_ of this?" he complained. "The town's rife with the stuff!" He sat back and glared at the lot of it. "Those candles were made in town, weren't they? And I bet that those herbs were grown somewhere around Smallville; they look fresh," he said, pointing at the offending items, two of many. "Doesn't the green crystal get into the water table on some of the farms?"

...Yes, he knew he was whining, but Clark really didn't have to look at him like _that_ for it. Since when was meteor rock not an explanation for something crazy happening in Smallville, anyway?!

"Lex," Clark said patiently, fingering one of the dried bundles of herbs, "I'm pretty sure that if there was enough meteor rock here to set something off that it'd have to be a pretty obviously large amount." He poked at the herbs again once more before setting them back down. "Or at least noticeable."

Lex grumbled.

"Maybe it was the bowl," Lex said, frowning down at it. He flipped it over. ...Made in China. Drat.

"Maybe it was the alcohol," Clark said.

"There wasn't any alcohol in the ceremony. Maybe it was--" ...Hey, wait a minute. Lex looked up at Clark with a full-on glare.

"There is nothing wrong with my alcohol."

"You were drunk."

"Not that drunk!" Lex felt offended. "I don't black out when I'm drunk! Not unless--"

"Unless what?"

Lex winced, then glanced away. "Not unless there's something wrong with it --if someone slips something into it!" he amended when he realized what Clark must be thinking. "Like drugs, not-- jesus, Clark! If I drank bad wine, I would know it from the taste!"

Clark was giving him that judgmental look.

Then Lex had a stroke of insight.

"The incense!" Lex said suddenly.

"What?"

"Incense." Lex repeated, with a slow smile:

"Incense."

Clark stared.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"I don't like this idea," Lex told Clark.

"You did it with Lana before," Clark told him, rummaging around the circle. They'd cleaned up the room a bit first in the span of a few short hours, set it mostly back-to-rights, just in case...

"I didn't like the idea before, either," Lex said.

"Then why didn't you just tell her that?" Clark said.

Lex turned his head and glared at Clark. Hadn't he just explained that earlier?

"This isn't going to work," Lex said.

Clark frowned over his shoulder at him as he slammed down the switch that shut off the electricity for the entire mansion.

All the lights went off.

It was pitch black for a moment, until Clark turned on the flashlight he'd grabbed from the kitchen.

"Why don't you think it's going to work?" Clark said, and though he said it lightly, Lex could hear an undercurrent of suspicion in his tone.

"Because even though I sent all the staff home for the night, like before, and we've just shut off all the power to the building, like before, and we cleaned up the library so that it is in somewhat the same state it was in before, and even if you want me to get as drunk as I had been before on the same wine as before," which Lex was also _not_ happy about doing in front of Clark, because he'd been very, _very_ drunk the previous night, and he didn't want to become acquainted with the sort of look Clark gave him when he was thoroughly disgusted at his excesses. Not anytime soon. Clark also could not imbibe himself, needing to be the 'sober one' for the ritual, not to mention being Jonathan Kent's underage and generally law-abiding son. "Even if we do all that, there are still several problems with this setup," Lex informed him dryly.

"Like what?" Clark said, dropping his flashlight beam to the floor.

Lex took a moment to compose his thoughts as he followed Clark out of the machine room in the basement of the mansion and into the underground hallway. Then he held up a single finger.

"One, you are a skeptic. Lana was adamant about shutting off the electricity because she thought even the slightest E-M field effect might impact the ceremony. Somehow," Lex said in a wry tone, glancing up at Clark, "I suspect that the impact of 'disbeliever vibes' emanating from the person actually performing the ceremony itself would have a much stronger disruptive effect on the outcome of the ceremony than a little electrical wiring running through the mansion walls a half-dozen yards away."

Lex held up another finger. "Two, you are not Lana. The result might have been entirely dependent upon her presence and her actions. She may have performed the ceremony correctly; she may not have. Regardless, you will not perform it the same way she did. The results also may have had something to do with her spending so much time talking to her dead parents in a cemetery over the years -- priming the pump, so to speak," Lex said. "And for all we know, it might even have something to do with her being female, not male. The variation in our reactions might be gender-dependent, or even physiology-dependent. There are drugs and other environmental factors that can have different effects based on the unique characteristics of the individual being exposed to them."

"Three," Lex continued, proffering yet another digit skyward, "while we cleaned up the library, everything is not in exactly the same configuration as before, if only due to the fact that several items and articles were not just strewn about, but broken or shattered against the floor--"

"It doesn't have to be perfect, Lex!" Clark griped.

"--no, it may not have to be, to achieve similar results as the previous night," Lex agreed. "But conversely, it might need to be. We don't know that," he said. "There might have been some resonance--"

"Resonance," Clark said flatly.

"--yes, _resonance_ ," Lex repeated, annoyed at being interrupted. "As an example, a bridge can shake itself apart if it is subject to wind blowing across it at its harmonic frequencies--"

"--a stupid made-up ceremony isn't the Tacoma Narrows bridge--" Clark said peevishly.

"--and if one was trying to weaken the 'veil' separating physical dimensions, using some sort of resonant harmonic frequencies amplified by strategic object placement could theoretically help with that," Lex ended, all but glaring at Clark.

"What?" Clark said, turning to Lex, startled.

"The idea of ghosts and spirits isn't a new one," Lex informed Clark. "And these days there are a theorized 10, 11, or 26 physical dimensions, not just the four we sense in a limited manner. Which number you think it is, exactly, depends on whether you subscribe to Superstring theory, M-theory, or Bosonic string theory, respectively," Lex told him. "We've only been able to measure the four so far: movement constrained to a line, a plane, three-dimensional space with depth, and a limited sense of the movement of time. The others we have no hard evidence determining their existence or nonexistence, as of yet. For all we know, everyone really does have a 'soul' of some sort, something _more_ to them that science cannot yet measure, that exists or extends to or 'lives' within those other dimensions that science has not yet proven, only touching upon this sensory plane due to our souls being 'rooted' in our four-dimensionally constrained bodies. For all we know, these 'souls' might be 'set loose' to wander those higher dimensions more freely upon our physical body-death, which I suppose you could think of as Heaven, Hell, or someplace in-between, depending upon the karmic energy state of the individual in question at the time of their passing from this world into the next."

Clark blinked at him.

"It isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility that one could use some special sort of harmonics to elevate or reduce n-dimensional objects to existing more fully in or between higher and lower physical dimensions. We already know how to shift elements between energy states of matter, such as water becoming ice or steam, and how to excite or reduce the energy states of electrons and other atomic particles inside atoms. It's the same principle, just on a larger scale," Lex continued, "though I would think that that would be more feasible to enact using some sort of E-M radiation to produce the harmonics, rather than a person's voice." Lex dropped his shoulders slightly in a shrug. "I suppose it's possible that vocal tones could cause some physical resonance in objects that could in turn cause the vibrating, resonant E-M fields necessary to do so. And it would fit with Lana's adamant adherence to wanting no outside E-M interference in the immediate area." He glanced up at Clark. "And if there were similarly-placed objects that enhanced the person's voice as well..."

Clark was frowning down at him.

"A person's voice can be... 'enhanced' by objects?" Clark said. "...Converted?"

"Stonehenge is a wonderful example of enhancing outdoor acoustics," Lex supplied. "There have been studies done regarding the reflective properties of the stones and their placement in the ring. Druids chanting inside the original ring would have their voices projected well outside the range of the hill, due to the reflections of the sound upon stone. The reverberations and reflections were amplified by bouncing off the hard stone at particular angles and distances, before radiating out through the regular 'cracks' in the circle -- the open gaps through the trilithons."

"Uh, right," said Clark. "Guess they wouldn't have speakers and microphones back then."

Lex smiled. "No, they didn't. Though microphones are also a rather good example of a modern-day medium of conversion," he smiled. "And of course, if Lana's projected voice was resonating with objects in the room, that might explain the lack of meteor rock in the ceremonial objects themselves -- what objects were scattered around the room and resonating with her voice might have contained the meteor rock, instead. ...Of course, resonance is only the third point. The fourth is the timing."

"Timing?" Clark asked, frowning.

"Mm," Lex said, nodding. "While Halloween was yesterday, and Samhain technically spanned dusk yesterday to dusk today, and the Day of the Dead spans today and tomorrow with tomorrow being All Soul's Day, All Saint's Day is upon us tonight. While All Soul's Day is in the midst of these celebrations of the afterlife, and would initially be thought to be more powerful of the three days because of it, being at the apex, _we_ are trying to perform a ceremony for restless spirits. All Soul's Day is specifically for celebrating the lives of those who have died and passed on who were shriven -- that is, blessed and consecrated at their death and resting in peace."

"Meaning?"

" _Meaning_ , that those are the sort who would, I think, make for rather happy ghosts, rather than angry, library-destroying ones who might feel a marked need to give a good haunting of the living to blow off some steam," Lex said, gesturing. "Assuming, of course, that the celebrations are, in fact, actually marking days of mystical and-or dimensional confluence," Lex added. "If it's simply the result of human belief and spiritual confluence, then we're shit out of luck, because the only holiday most people celebrate around these parts is Halloween," he said, glancing up at Clark, "and we probably wouldn't have the mystic 'juice' to work off of for a repeat performance."

"...You know, you've jumped to ghosts pretty quickly there, Lex," Clark said slowly, glancing back over his shoulder as he walked into the mansion's wine cellar. "What about the incense?"

"We're in the midst of a three-day holiday celebrating the dead," Lex said, feeling annoyed again. "I passed out, and Lana saw something that she obviously thought I was responsible for. It's not that big a leap to thinking 'ghosts'. Besides, what else could it be?" Lex said. "The incense might've caused me to pass out in a dreamless sleep, and Lana to have waking hallucinations, but there is some open-mindedness involved in what essentially amounts to a spirit-quest."

Lex frowned, sliding his hands into his pockets as he follwed Clark in. "While Lana might have been open to seeing her parents, I _don't_ think what she had on her mind was me doing something slap-worthy, if not outright horrible. Lana would have had to have a full-on hallucination of me doing... well, _whatever_ I did... for the incense to be the sole cause. I'm fairly sure I collapsed at some point shortly after midnight."

"But you woke up in bed," Clark pointed out, and then pointed out something which had come out during the kitchen fiasco: "And none of your staff put you to bed."

Lex's frown deepened before he forced his expression to clear. He lightly ran his fingers over the corks and necks of the bottle of wine in the rack in front of him. He sighed.

"Yes, I did, and no, it seems they may not have," Lex admitted.

" 'May not have'?" Clark echoed incredulously. "What, you think _they_ forgot what they did when they got in this morning, too?"

Lex frowned.

"...No, I suppose that would be unlikely," Lex said slowly. If it had been the incense, it would have dissipated by that point. His staff would not have been in a suggestible frame of mind that bright, sunny morning, either.

"So it could've actually been you, doing something, and not Lana hallucinating," Clark continued.

Lex looked at Clark askance. He didn't like where this was going. "Clark--"

"Lana got home safely last night. Do you think she would've been able to drive back all right if she was hallucinating things?"

Lex had a sinking feeling.

"Clark, if it had been _just_ the incense, I would not have--" been feeling the way he had all day: aimless, directionless, disoriented, tired, and easily confused. He hadn't really started to improve until late that afternoon.

"--But it wasn't just the incense," Clark interrupted. "You were drinking, too."

...No, Lex _really_ didn't like where this was going. Not at all.

"Remind me again why we are doing this?" Lex said smoothly, slipping his hands into his pockets and turning to face Clark, because he wasn't seeing any sort of benefit at all. If he did this, and nothing happened, Clark wouldn't believe that the setup was inherently different -- he would simply believe that Lex had 'pranked' Lana last night, wouldn't admit to what had happened, and that he was lying now to cover his guilt. If he did this, and the same thing happened as last night, then either Clark was right and it was just Lex -- in which case, Lex would do something rather horrible, he wasn't sure what, and _Clark_ might not forgive him, which Lex _could not live with_ \-- or Lex was right and they both would be subject to something horrible, which Lex would not remember and Clark could very well misremember, and that might, still, put their friendship at risk.

And they couldn't set up any videocameras to record anything, because of the no-electricity rule. Nor could they invite extra viewers along, lest they risk exposing someone else to something Smallville-level terrible -- which neither he nor Clark were much inclined to do -- or the presence of those additional presences otherwise prevent the reoccurrence of last night's events from taking place a second time. ...Not that Lex could think of anyone else who might be willing to watch: Lana was out, and Chloe was firmly on Lana's side. Pete hated him, and even if Chloe wanted to get to the bottom of things, she _disbelieved_ in magic and mysticism nearly as much as she _believed_ in the meteor-rock phenomenon.

"We're doing this because we both want to know what happened, and Lana isn't talking," Clark said firmly, pulling a wine bottle out of the rack and thrusting it at Lex's chest.

Lex looked down at the label on the bottle of wine, thought that, no, actually he _could_ very well live without knowing what happened to Lana, and stifled a grimace.

He reached up and gingerly took the bottle from Clark.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex wasn't sure whether it had been a good thing or bad that Clark had had him determine exactly how much he should drink to be as drunk as he had been the previous night, and how quickly, _before_ he started drinking. He'd been pacing himself fairly well most of last evening, but he hadn't exactly been drinking a glass an hour, so it had built up a bit over the hours.

Luckily for him, he hadn't moved on from the wine to the harder spirits.

Five bottles in two hours still didn't seem like a good idea, when Clark was watching, there to see. And keeping count for him.

Finally, it hit eleven o'clock or so. Lex thought. He wasn't completely sure. The face of his wristwatch, the last gift he'd ever received from his mother, was a bit too shiny in the light of the flashlight, and didn't have numbers on it, besides. It would have ruined the look of the franc.

He felt... odd.

"Come on," Clark said, standing and holding out a hand.

Lex took it, and let Clark haul him up.

And then nearly lost his balance.

He bumped into Clark's shoulder and grabbed his arm belatedly.

"Lex?"

"I..." Lex blinked, then shivered and hunched in on himself slightly. He was feeling...

He didn't like this feeling...

" _Lex?_ "

Lex tried to shake it off.

"I'm fine," he said as he glanced uneasily from side to side, even though he wasn't. Fine.

He glanced up and had to look away at the frown Clark had trained on him. "Are you sure?" Clark asked.

"I... I'm fine," he repeated, even though he felt unsure about it, and his voice wavered slightly. But what could he say? That he felt a little groggy? About as oddly as he had that morning, that now he felt that much worse again? How could he? He couldn't really characterize the feeling, just that... he felt...

Clark was still frowning down at him.

Lex shivered again and leaned up against Clark's chest, sliding his hands up to splay across the broad musculature, and tucking his head down against Clark's shoulder. Whatever it was that was... there-but-not-there... seemed to go away, to ease, when he got closer to Clark.

He felt a slight drifting sensation and for a moment, it was almost as if his hands were sinking into -- through -- Clark's chest. Although they weren't. Because that would be silly. Silly, silly Lex.

Lex leaned in a little more, closed his eyes and breathed for a bit. Felt a little more solid, and a little... not... at the same time.

He could sense something like sunlight and light and life under his fingertips, just beneath Clark's skin. Something he could almost-but-not-quite... touch.

"Lex?" he heard quietly. "You ok?"

"Mmmm," Lex said, breathing out a happy sigh. Because he was _warm-close-safe_ \--

"Lex?"

"Mm?"

"Are you ready to go upstairs?"

Lex slowly leaned into Clark a little more. He was so.... warm... and it was so nice. Nothing could hurt him...

And then he was floating, floating away...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex woke up on a couch under a warm, soft blanket.

He lazily blinked his eyes open.

It was still dark. Dark out, looking out the windows, still night.

There were a lot of pretty little lights around the room.

Candles. No more flashlight-light. Because batteries were...

"Electricity," Lex murmured as he snuggled under the blankets. Mm. Warm. Like Clark.

Everything would be ok, as long as Clark was here.

Clark was here, so everything would be ok.

"Lex?"

"Mm."

"Do you know where you are?"

"Li-brar-y," Lex said sleepily. He was tired. He hadn't slept well last night. Had he?

Darkness.

...He'd blinked and forgotten to open his eyes again. He remembered to open his eyes again.

Clark was sitting in the middle of a haphazard circle of odd things. He was kneeling, leaning forward, poking at something. The Ouija board?

"Do you remember how you got here?" Clark asked. He glanced back up at Lex.

"Floating," Lex said absently. At Clark's slight frown, he sighed and put forth a little more mental effort to try and remember properly. "Wasn't... me. You... um... did something?"

Clark's brow was furrowed. He looked almost... worried?

"I picked you up and carried you," Clark told him.

"Ok." Because Lex was okay with that, really.

Clark was biting his lip absently.

"You really don't remember?" he heard Clark's voice ask.

"Floating," said Lex. He was slowly falling back asleep, and he was ok with that, too.

Clark let out a soft sigh.

"You weren't floating Lex."

"Felt like floating," Lex murmured.

Clark sighed again.

"How did you get up here with Lana?" Clark asked.

"Walked." Lana had dragged him, actually. He'd not had any difficulty getting up the stairs -- it was _not_ getting up the stairs he'd had difficulty with.

There was a pause.

"Lex, did you eat anything tonight?" Clark asked.

Lex thought about it a moment. Had he? "No."

"Did you have dinner last night?"

"Yes." He remembered _that_. He'd snuck something out of the fridge that Cook had left for him before they had left and Lex had gone down to the basement to hide in the cellar and started drinking.

Clark sighed again and muttered something Lex couldn't quite pick up.

...It reminded like a little of the way he was feeling before. Like something had been whispering at the edges of his hearing. Or scratching lightly a few inches away from his mind, sharpening claws. Just out of reach.

Except that hearing Clark was a _nice_ feeling, and the odd feeling from before hadn't really been like that **at all** , all whispering and scratches and all-eyes-staring but in a bad way he couldn't ignore, because if it _was_ like that then he could have described it with words, and he _didn't have the words for it_.

"Stupid English," Lex muttered, curling up on the couch. "Not enough words." But then, it was a bully, after all. It probably just hadn't beaten up all the other loser-languages for enough words, yet.

Lex didn't like bullies.

He liked Greek and Latin, better. They got along with everyone. All those romantic languages were friends with them, depended on them, they were nice, everybody liked them...

He closed his eyes again, on purpose this time.

"Hm?" Clark asked.

"...No-thing," Lex grumbled quietly, shifting on the sofa cushions as he tried to get comfortable again.

It was quiet for a bit, just Lex breathing, and Clark breathing, and small movement sounds from Clark.

Then:

"Okay, I think I'm ready."

...Ready? Ready for what?

Lex cracked his eyes open again.

Clark was sitting, indian-style, exactly where Lana had been positioned the night before. He had the book open in his lap.

Most of the candles had been blown out. The only ones lit now were...

" _No_ ," said Lex, closing his eyes again and turning over, showing his back to Clark.

"Lex..."

"Don't want to," Lex grumbled, pulling the blanket up over his head and hiding under it.

"Lex, I thought we agreed on this."

"No," actually, they hadn't, Clark had just said he wanted them to, and Lex didn't want to.

"Lex..." Another sigh. "It'll be quick. You can get right back to sleep, after. Okay?"

Lex _really_ didn't want to, but Clark was being all... _reasonable_ about it, and he'd probably be disappointed if Lex said no...

Lex turned over again and peered out under the blanket at Clark.

...

...

...Mistake.

Lex grumbled quietly, but he slowly sat up.

He slowly pushed aside the blanket and stood up carefully.

It was fine; he only needed to stay up for three or four steps or so. He managed it, before he slid back down to a kneeling posture.

Where he'd been kneeling the night before.

_Oh, not **this** again..._

Lex looked up with a glower, then lost the glower, sighed and took the profferred lit candle from Clark's hand.

He sat there as Clark frowned and went through the motions: lighting candles, chanting, lighting incense, more chanting...

Clark sounded different from Lana, very different -- halting over the words, odd pronunciation, starting and stopping. There was no real cadence there. Lana had had a cadence, even if her voice, her tone, had had no melody to it. Lana had said it smoothly; Clark, harshly.

Lana must have practiced...

How many times? Lex wondered.

Lex blinked and swayed, but he was tired, not... _tired_. It wasn't the same as the night before. And when the clock started chiming, it sounded the same way it always had.

The warm feeling of Clark being there with him didn't go away. He felt... safe.

Clark finally finished, and so did the clock.

Lex sighed deeply.

Clark closed the book and looked up at him, skeptical, but uncertain. Almost expectantly. He waited.

"Not the same at all," Lex told him, offering his candle up.

Clark blew it out lightly, then took it from him.

He got to work blowing out the rest of the candles, too. All but two to see by.

"I guess it wasn't the incense, then," Clark said. "Or the alcohol."

"Mm."

"Any ideas?" Clark asked.

Lex frowned, and thought hard for a moment, and blinked... and then started giggling. "Mmmmaybe...?"

"...Lex?" Clark frowned at him.

"Cellphone," Lex said, still giggling, and he slowly pulled his out.

He checked it.

"Battery," he said, and snickered. Last night his phone had died, being down in the cellar for so long. He hadn't turned it off, and it had been trying to punch through the walls for signal, and the battery had run down so low he hadn't been able to turn it on again. He'd had to get another one from company stores. Or, rather, Gabe had gotten him one for him.

But this battery had been new, and fully-charged, and he and Clark hadn't been down in the cellar for hours on end. It still had plenty of electricity left in it, powering it, and he hadn't thought to turn it off.

And cellphones put out a drastic amount of E-M radiation to connect to the towers and communication satellites necessary for the system to work, far more interference than allowing current to run through any wiring in the mansion's walls could ever produce.

He laughed, pulled the battery, and tossed the phone and the battery to opposite ends of the room.

"There!" he said smartly, swaying slightly. "Want to try again?" And then he laughed.

Clark was staring at him.

Lex smiled.

"...You really don't remember what you did to Lana?" Clark asked as he slowly set the book aside.

Lex's smile slowly slipped off of his face. He frowned up at Clark as Clark began to stand and was suddenly towering over him.

"I didn't do anything to Lana," Lex said.

"Lex..."

"I didn't do anything to Lana!" Lex insisted, still kneeling, hands curling into fists on his knees. "Why won't you believe me?"

"Well, something happened, Lex!" Clark said, exasperated. "Are you telling me she slapped you for no reason?"

"Yes!" exclaimed Lex, shoving himself to his feet abruptly-- ...or _trying_ to. He swayed and felt a little dizzy, not managing to handle his balance properly, and his knees hit the floor again before he'd gotten more than a few inches up off it.

"Yes!" Lex repeated adamantly, stubbornly, then looked up and got a better look at Clark's face. Or his shoulders -- his shoulders were squared and tense. That meant angry. "...No?"

Clark crossed his arms and sighed out noisily.

He leaned down and scooped up his flashlight. "Are you telling me that Lana's a liar?"

"Yes--" Lex started, then, "No. Maybe. Yes. --She shouldn't have slapped me!"

Clark stared down at him, and Lex couldn't read his expression, there wasn't enough light.

"Lex--"

"I didn't do anything wrong!" Lex exploded angrily, throwing his hands up. "I did what she asked, and then what she wanted, and-- I didn't--!"

Lex lifted his hands to his temples, pressed his palms against them, trying to think of how to convince Clark, how to explain--

" _\--She asked me to!_ " he told Clark desperately, running both hands up over his head. "I did what she thought she wanted!"

There was a long silence.

"Thanks, Lex," Clark said finally. "I think that kind of clears everything up."

"It... does?" Lex said, glancing up at Clark uncertainly, because he couldn't see how, if Lana didn't get a say, only him.

"Yeah, it kinda does," Clark continued evenly. "I mean, you'd do anything for your friends, right?"

"Well, yes," Lex said, slowly dropping his hands. "I'd do anything for you." He'd thought that was obvious.

There was another pause. "And Lana?"

"No," said Lex truthfully. "She's not my friend."

"Right..." Clark said quietly.

And then he flicked on the flashlight and turned and walked away.

"...Clark?" Lex said.

"Go to bed, Lex," he heard, and Lex frowned because Clark didn't sound happy with him, but he didn't sound _unhappy_ with him, either.

No, he kind of sounded like... he was talking to a stranger?

"Clark?" Lex called after him, starting to feel worried, because what had he done wrong? He couldn't think of anything. ...Had he done something wrong? Why was Clark leaving?? --What had he done wrong?!

Lex clutched his head in his hands and felt a horrible, panicky pain in his chest. He bent over, curled in on himself, trying to think.

After awhile, he lifted his head, with not any more of an idea what to say, but he had to say _something_.

"Clark--" he started, but then stopped in shock.

Clark wasn't here.

"...Clark?" he slowly stood up, almost staggering as he managed it, looking around as he did so.

...Where was Clark?

Had he left?

...He hadn't been caught up thinking that long, had he?

Had he fallen asleep without realizing it?

It was dead-quiet in the mansion. Too quiet.

No footsteps.

"Clark?" he asked quietly, standing there, in the middle of a small pool of candlelight, but he heard no response.

...Clark had already left?

Clark was gone?

...

What should he do now?

...

...Clark had said to go to bed.

He should do what Clark said.

Lex shifted uneasily, then slowly lowered himself down again. He needed a light. One of the candles. He would need something to see by, wandering the halls...

Maybe he should get the generator running again before he...

He reached forward, leaning out over the Ouija board, and almost fell over. He slapped one hand down on it quickly for balance, palm flat.

The side of his hand hit the planchette and the little piece went spinning away.

Lex paused for a moment and frowned after it as it skittered across the floor and then slid out of sight.

And then the clock chimed once, loudly.

Lex jumped, then relaxed and breathed out a laugh. Of course! One o'clock. It had been midnight when--

The clock chimed again.

...What?

The clock chimed a third time, almost a loud clamor.

Lex's head snapped up. He couldn't have been out of it for _that_ long--

Four.

Lex shivered and straightened slightly, slowly pulling away from the candle flames as he looked about in confusion.

Five.

Under his palm, the board suddenly went cold as ice. Lex yelped and pulled his hand away, half-falling backwards.

Six.

"No..." Lex said quietly, but he couldn't hear himself over the clock's reverberating tones.

Seven.

Lex's eyes widened.

"NO!" he yelled out, pushing himself back upright, but he couldn't even feel the vibrations in his throat, let alone _hear_ \--

Eight.

Oh god.

Nine.

Lex's eyes widened. He knew what had gone wrong.

Ten.

It hadn't been eleven o'clock when Clark had grabbed him. It had been _ten_ \--

Eleven.

\--and he'd been sleepy and safe and not paying attention and he'd miscounted--

Twelve.

The twin lit candles went out like someone -- some _thing_ \-- had _blown_ them out. Abruptly.

Lex wrapped his arms around himself and _shook_.

The silence died out.

And then the whispers began.

Lex slapped his hands over his ears.

But it didn't keep the voices out in the least. They only got _louder_.

The warm, comforting, safe feeling Lex had felt earlier had left when Clark had. He wasn't safe anymore, not with the source gone, the remnants seeping away, happening so slowly that he hadn't noticed until...

It was too late.

Lex tilted his head back and _screamed_.

Trying to drown them out.

It did him no good.

He screamed and screamed and screamed--

~*~*~*~*~*~

When Lex woke up Saturday morning -- that is, when he got out of bed, because he hadn't been able to fall asleep the night before -- he rose with the sun as it rose, as the whispers slowly diminished, as the light shone in, and he had a very distinct purpose in mind.

He was going to perform the ceremony again, himself.

All by himself.

~*~*~*~*~*~

It made perfect sense, really.

~*~*~*~*~*~


	3. Saturday, November 2, 2002 -- All Souls, The Day of the Dead, The Haunting Time (Somewhere, Somewhen...)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvI5w0cG68o)

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex stared down at the humming generator, the unholy mass of circuitry that powered the mansion where he lived.

He could almost _feel_ the electricity vibrating through it. It made his teeth ache.

It made his _head_ ache. Throb. Pulse.

He shuddered.

He reached out a hand--

~*~*~*~*~*~

 _\--he sobbed and cringed back as the voices laughed, cried,_ screamed _at him from all sides._

 _He had to turn the power back on. He_ had _to. The electricity disrupted the ceremony, should have, would have. It would disrupt the voices. It would._

_It would. It had to. It must._

_He reached out again. The voices got louder. He shrank back again, crying, scared at the multitude of those voices. At what they were saying. At what they weren't. --At what they wanted, except they wouldn't say, and..._

_Some of them murmured curses. Some of them murmured encouragement._

_Some of them laughed and said he was a coward, couldn't do it, that it wouldn't make any difference anyway, they weren't going away, no matter what he did; they were_ here to stay _now--_

 _One of them whispered in his ear. Warningly told him oh-so-quietly that the switch was electrified, tampered with,_ sabotaged _, and_ if he touched it-- __

_He couldn't do it._

_He couldn't do it._

_It was--_

_\--what if it was--_

_If it was tampered with--_

_Lex didn't want to die, all alone in the dark, with the voices to grab him and drag him down and shred him apart, his soul to pieces, little pieces, gobble him down like a thin little delicacy, the multitude, would he still feel it after? eaten dead-alive?..._

_Lex didn't want to die at all. Not even a little bit._

_\--He told himself that his response was completely irrational. He told himself that any trepidation on his part was insane, that he knew better. He knew he was alone in the mansion. There was no-one else here. It was just him, alone in the dark. The voices weren't real. It was all in his head. No-one had done anything to the generator -- Clark hadn't been hurt earlier -- he could do this. He could do this._

_He reached out his hand again, shaking. Fingers, stretching towards the main disconnect for the mansion, to undo what they'd done, the knife switch just an inch away, then half an inch, then..._

_He couldn't do it._

_Because that voice, that_ trusted _voice, had sounded_ **so** sure _\--_

 _The neverending chorus of voices grew louder, swelled, jeering,_ laughing _, laughing at him,_ at him _, at--_

 _Lex staggered backwards, hit the wall, doubled over. He lost control,_ screaming _at them to_ just leave him alone! _but they wouldn't listen, wouldn't do what he wanted! Hands spasming, he wrapped his arms tightly around himself, shaking--_

_The matchbook, burning, meager, only source of light and warmth left to him, that he'd been able to find, use, that would stay lit, the candles wouldn't, they blew out over and over, but the matches... the matches... hit the floor--_

_\--went out--_

~*~*~*~*~*~

\--he calmly slid his fingers around the smooth bar, grasped the switch handle, and slammed it home.

The generator wound down.

The thrumming pulsing _madness_ ceased.

Silence. For a moment.

Then...

Quiet whispers threaded their way back in, in small ripples of waves.

Lex breathed in. He breathed out.

He turned and walked towards the exit of the generator room.

When he reached the doorway, he just as calmly hurled the flashlight he was holding into the side wall with as much strength as he could yet muster.

It _smashed_ into the plaster, plastic casing and glass bulb _shattering_ against the hard brick mortar that quietly lay just underneath the thin, thin surface.

Lex smiled.

~*~*~*~*~*~

_Lex had to get out._

_He didn't know how._

_\--He couldn't touch anything, he would die-die-_ die _if he did._

_He couldn't crawl; he'd never make it._

_His knees almost hit the floor a few times anyway in the struggle._

_The jeering, mocking tones didn't let up. They followed him, circling, near and far and near again -- close, too close--_

_He staggered out into the hallway and hit the far wall._

_He was disoriented and confused, and hadn't realized he'd made it out for some time._

_He didn't know how much time._

_Time lost meaning._

_It was just him, and the voices, and nothing else._

_He had no idea how he'd made it out of the machine room without touching anything._

_He had no idea how he managed to make it to the stairs. Make it upstairs._

_He had no idea, and he had no idea how long it took, in the pitch black darkness, with the voices all around, with nothing and no-one to--_

_But when he made it upstairs, nearly fell out into the kitchen, he almost cried in relief at the moonlight streaming in through the windows._

_He could_ see _, the room lit in blue-white grey-black stark relief, and he gave out a shaky laugh at the same time a heavy, weighty dread curled up low in his belly and started to fill it up, him up, from the inside, deep inside, to slowly, slowly rise..._

 _But he wasn't thinking of that. Not about that. Not_ then _. He was too focused on his salvation. Clark._

_The phone._

_The phone. The landline, that didn't need electricity. That didn't need electricity to call out, to work, to connect, so that he could--_

_He teetered his way over and fell up against the wall beside it. He pulled the receiver out of its cradle with shaky hands, dialed the number by memory that he knew by heart, the voices all around him utterly meaningless now because Clark would come, Clark would come. Clark would come and_ drive them all away _\--_

_It rang._

_Voices murmured._

_It rang._

_A cacophony._

_It rang._

_He hardly heard it, through the surges of noise around him._

_It--_

_"Hello?" a sleep-laden voice asked, tinnily through the line._

_Lex sagged against the wall. He nearly wept in relief._

_"Who is this?"_

_"This is Lex," he said, like he always did. Like he always did._

_There was a pause. "Luthor?"_

_Lex blinked. And then he frowned slightly. He tilted his head back, his lips parted--_

_"Do you know what time it is?" came the abrupt question._

_"I-- no..." Lex admitted in confusion, because something was..._

_"What do you want?" came the next question, just as abruptly._

_Lex shivered slightly._

_"I..." Lex said. But now he was having trouble getting the words out. The important, necessary words. "I need..." Lex swallowed hard, suddenly feeling a little scared. "...Help?" he asked quietly, plaintively. Because something was..._

_There was a long pause. So long that Lex began to worry that he hadn't heard what had been said._

_"Help?" asked ponderously. "With what?"_

_\--_ the voices _\-- he thought._

_"Ghosts," he said._

_"Ghosts," he heard echoed dully down the line._

_...something was..._

_"Ye-es..." said Lex, nervously. Because he knew Clark didn't believe in ghosts, but he'd asked for help, and... and... something_ was _..._

_"You are worried about ghosts," he heard, just as hollowly._

_"Yes," said Lex. Because he was. Worried. And they were. Ghosts. And..._

_"...And so you call here at three-thirty in the morning?" he heard, and there was anger below._

_"...yes?" Lex whispered, curling inward a little and feeling very, very small._

_...something was..._

_"Get yourself to bed," he heard. "Quit jumping at shadows and deal with it yourself," came the rough reply._

_...something was wrong..._

_"C-clark...?" Lex said, but he was talking to a click and a dial tone._

_Wide-eyed, shivering, Lex continued to clutch the phone to his ear._

_"...Clark?" he tried again, to silence, as the dial tone cut out._

_Oh god._

_Something was wrong._

_Something was wrong._

_Something was wrong. Something was wrong._ Something was **wrong** _._

_"Cc-llarrrrkk??" Lex said, drawing out the syllables, shaking, because this wasn't happening, this wasn't happening._

__I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything wrong.

I didn't mean to. __

_It hurt to breathe._

_"Sorry, Clark can't come to the phone right now," a deep, throaty male voice said in his ear._

_Lex_ yelped _and dropped the receiver._

_He staggered away from it and into the island in the middle of the kitchen, hard._

_He lost his breath, it went right out of him. His chest hurt._

_It hurt to breathe._

_He watched the receiver swing from the end of the phone cord, knocking against the wall, and he reached up a hand to curl around his ear like a jagged talon, like he might be able to rip the memory away out of his ear, out of his head--_

_Lex jumped as he heard a clear chuckle come from the receiver, just as clear as it had been when he'd been holding it up, close--_

_"You think you're so smart," he heard the voice say, deep and dark and amused and low. "You don't know nothin', kid. We're comin' for you. We're comin'. We're_ finally _comin'," the voice breathed out. "We've been waiting a long time, kid. We've all been waiting--"_

 _He sounded eager._ Hungry _. They all did, suddenly. Lex shuddered._

_He took a step forward and reached out a hand--_

_\--and felt the same overwhelming wave of fear hit him, drench him, soak into him, down into-- down under-- down underneath his skin, and he shivered and knew -- he_ **knew** _suddenly, all-at-once like he knew his own name -- he **knew** that even if he could pick up the receiver and even if he could manage to put it back in the cradle, that the voice wouldn't go away. The voice wouldn't stop._

_So instead he grabbed the sides of the cradle with both hands, ripped it out of the wall, and flung it across the kitchen with inhuman adrenaline-fueled strength._

_The line snapped._

_The phone hit the wall._

_The voice stopped._

_Panting, he staggered backwards up against the fridge._

_There was no reprieve._

_Cold fingers curled up from the surface to pick at his clothes, to grab at him._

_\--_ nonono _\--_

_Lex shoved himself off of the surface, tore himself away, staggered back, staggered back into the hallway._

_Monsters._

_Monsters._

_Monsters under the bed._

_Monsters all around._

_People were monsters._

_Monsters_ everywhere _._

_He needed to get away._

_He clutched at his head._

_They wouldn't stop._

_They wouldn't leave him alone._

_Why wouldn't they leave him alone!?!?_

_\--He didn't do anything wrong!!!_

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex sat on a stool at the island in the middle of the kitchen.

He sipped at a cup of cold tea, staring vacantly out the windows.

He sat there and waited.

He sat there and waited until the sun dipped below the horizon, painting everything a bloody red.

He sat there and waited for the sun to go down, and for night to fall upon him.

He ran out of tea.

~*~*~*~*~*~

_He'd made it to his room._

_He'd made it to his bed._

_He was alone, except he wasn't, and they wouldn't leave him alone, and--_

_\--who were they? What did they want? Why did they want him?_

_Why did they want_ him? __

_"Go away," he moaned. "Go away."_

_He tossed and turned on the bed, on top of the sheets. He hadn't the presence of mind to think of hiding under them, anymore._

_They said horrible, horrible things._

_They said horrible, horrible things to him._

_Some of them were horribly terrifying. Some of them were horribly kind. All of it was horrible._

_He needed it to stop._

_He needed it to_ stop _._

_It hurt._

__It hurt. __

_\--make it stop make it stop--_

_He clutched at his head, at his chest, at his heart. His ears, but the voices were never any less clear. His neck, but the soft shivers of cold seeped right under his fingers, brushing against his skin._

_They wouldn't leave him alone._

_His head hurt._

_His heart hurt._

_His_ mind _\--_

_He couldn't tell what was real anymore._

_He knew it wasn't-- except it_ was _, and for every second that passed, that ticked away, that he couldn't count anymore, that fell through his fingers like molasses, like sand, like_ glass _sharp-edged and fine, he lost a piece, and a piece, and a piece, and the edges eroded..._

 _The moonlight streamed in mercilessly, and he cringed, as the cold steamed his breath and clouded his sight and slid down into his chest like_ knives _._

_He shuddered, and convulsed, as the voices did the same to his mind, over and over and over again._

_Over and_ over _and over and over and **over** and--_

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex wandered through the hallways, through rooms, through corridors and up stairs and down stairs and all through the mansion, that day.

He sat at the little island-table in the kitchen, but he wandered the mansion, too.

Sometimes at the same time. Maybe. He wasn't sure. It could have been.

...What time was it?

His watch had stopped.

Time had no meaning.

He sat at the little island-table in the kitchen, and he drank tea and blinked and didn't think much of anything at all.

He wandered the mansion aimlessly, looking for something that wasn't there and nothing that was, and didn't really think much as he did so.

He waited, aimlessly.

~*~*~*~*~*~

_He rose slowly as the sun rose, slowly, and the voices receded, just a bit, and a bit, and a bit at a time fading, like mist inexorably evaporating the morning sun._

_He heard noises in the house. Not like last night._

_He slid off of his bed and wandered out into the hallway,_

_"Mr. Luthor!" he heard. And while it had started out sunny, it had ended up less so._

_He nodded to his matronly housekeeping staff-in-charge as he walked down the hallway, and in a single moment abstractly saw what she did, from where she was: dark circles under the eyes; same clothes as the prior day, slept in and rumpled; pale skin--_

_And then he staggered sideways, slamming into the wall shoulder-first and_ shook _, feeling like he'd just been hit by a truck but -- more than that -- even less than secure in his skin, like he was being split, that something wasn't firmly in place, and was becoming unmoored, shoved about--_

_It hurt._

__It hurt _._

_"Sir?"_

_Lex wheezed slightly. He was having trouble breathing. His vision blurred as the lights flickered back on--_

_The lights._

_The_ lights. __

 __The lights. __

_\--_ **they did this to him** _\--_

_Lex resisted the urge to spit and hiss._

_Instead, he straightened and, with a great deal of effort, said, "Mrs. Henshaw, take the day off."_

_"What?" the woman said, startled._

_"Take the day off," Lex repeated, slowly. "You, the staff, everyone."_

_The woman just stood there and blinked at him_ \--the stupid cow-- _saying, "What?"_

_Another wave of increasing pressure-pain came and went, and he felt increasingly ill. "Get out," Lex ground out quietly, urgently through clenched teeth as his hand curled into a fist against the wall and he tried not to double over at yet another, third surge, because. The electricity. HURT._

_"What??"_

_"_ **GET OUT!!!** _" he shrieked at her, baring his teeth. He pulled himself upright by his fingernails through the wood paneling, leaving scar lines streaking down the fine-grained material, wanting nothing more than to do the same thing to her_ face _._

_The woman stumbled back a step, going dead white._

_And then she turned and fled._

_Lex clenched his teeth and closed his eyes and rode it out, wave after wave. He listened and waited. Footsteps. Scuffling. Doors opening and slamming. Voices he couldn't hear. All. Fading. To..._

_Silence._

_Finally._

_Except for the painful hum that was dividing him in twain._

_Part of him felt relief at his staff having vacated the premises and collapsed as his knees gave out, leaning against the wall for support._

_Part of him pulled himself back up again to standing with the rest of all of him. And then pushed off of the wall slowly._

_And then slowly, painfully, made his way to the machine room._

_There was a flashlight by the doorway._

_Lex stared down at it._

_He picked it up and turned it on._

_He felt little corsucating ripples, small waves of pure_ pain _begin to slither into and_ through _the palm of his hand, up to his wrist. It started to vibrate up his arm, echoed at his elbow in a way that made him twitch, bounced inside his bicep farther up to his shoulder, to begin to pool and ache_ there _\--_

_It hurt._

_He didn't like it._

_His head hurt, too. His whole body was already one dull throbbing ache, with_ that part _of him inside getting all tugged and pushed about; it was still only a horrible ache yet, just barely, still... but so-very-closely approaching that fine edge where it would all quickly begin morphing into excruciating mindless pain._

_He walked into the machine room._

_The electricity needed to be shut off. Now._

_It hurt._

_And it was going to be counterproductive_

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex wandered aimlessly.

The mansion was large.

He shivered slightly as he stepped up into the attic. He let his fingers touch upon, trail across, lightly caress the edges and planes of old trunks and boxes and sheets covering furniture with a fine layer of dust over all.

He felt a heaviness as he walked into the wine cellar. He took one step. No farther.

He didn't need to.

Drinking was...

...His problem was that he'd been drunk. Too drunk to...

It would go better, this time.

This time he'd be sober.

He'd need to be, for this.

He'd have his wits about them, and then...

He smiled.

...

He turned.

He wandered.

He didn't need the light. He had the sun. The whispers, even out of the light, even deep in the earth, didn't seem to be able to stand up against it, somehow.

He sat in the kitchen and sipped tea as the sun went down.

He wandered and wandered and stopped in front of the library.

He breathed out and took one last sip of tea. He closed his eyes. He breathed in.

The sun went down.

He breathed out.

He threw the doors wide and strode in, moved forward until he was towering over the mess of ritualistic detritus, and stared down at it.

The anger, his anger -- not nearly so hot, barely warm -- not nearly so angry, barely ambivalent -- banked, dropped lower as he sat there.

The sky began to darken.

In the growing gloom he tilted his head back, let that anger fountain up and fill him, used it to push back against the vibrating pressure all around him. Eagerness. Voices. Soft but growing stronger, already, already.

His face was expressionless, but his eyes smiled as he took in the scene. Perfect.

He breathed in.

Night was fast-approaching.

He pushed back, let it fill him, that hard, angry warmth, and then... just... let go.

He stood in the middle of the library, let his eyelids drop, and swayed.

The anger fell back, spiraled down, down to the core of him, and deeper.

The darkness enveloped him.

He breathed out.

He knelt down in Lana's, Clark's, _his_ place.

And the

fire

flickered

out.

Night was now upon him.

~*~*~*~*~*~

He felt calm.

~*~*~*~*~*~

He smiled.

~*~*~*~*~*~

He stood slowly. Slid off of the stool in the kitchen.

He walked to the library.

He threw the doors wide and strode in.

...when?

He felt calm.

He opened the door gently and slipped inside.

...now.

He felt calm.

He met and joined all of the echoes of himself there, well-met.

The ghosts, the voices, followed him in, just as silently, just as easily. Slipping in-between the lines. Slipping in through the cracks...

~*~*~*~*~*~

It was cold.

He built up a roaring fire.

It was still cold.

It kept the voices slightly at bay, though. For the moment.

Which was all he needed. Just enough breathing space to be able to concentrate, to think.

He retrieved Lana's spellbook and a few of the ritual essentials and sat himself down on the hearth in front of the roaring, crackling fireplace to the cackling of a few voices and the concerned murmurs of a few others.

The rest were just a soft roaring cacophony that chilled him to the bone, in counterpoint to the conflagration of wood and the waves of heat that did not warm him.

Cross-legged, he studied the grimoire intently. Poring over the pages, he took his time and carefully registered every minute detail of the ceremony he was about to perform, before committing each piece of it to memory.

He read it five times through before he felt confident that he had it memorized.

He then read it three times more for good measure.

And, by the time he was done, he was close to heaving a heavy sigh... and maybe several things that were far heavier, as well.

Because he understood.

He understood now.

This wasn't a ritual for a mock seance that a group of high school kids could conduct without effort, and look back upon with levity to joke and laugh about.

_\--for the thinning of the veil between this world and the next--_

This wasn't just some mere mystical phone call directly to a singular dearly-departed, to call them to one's side for tea and cakes and a nice little chat.

_\--a spiritual medium to facilitate communication--_

He glanced down at the Ouija board.

And smirked coldly.

This wasn't a ritual to allow a mere faint, brief connection, easily broken. This wasn't meant to allow those voices that wanted to be heard to come close, only to be restricted through middling steps, buffers, and walls, paper and cardboard and little plastic parts.

No.

This was for _thinning the veil_.

 _This_ was a ritual to let _all_ of those ghosts come through, **uninhibited**.

 _Completely_ unrestricted.

It wasn't _safe_.

No, not at all.

But what it was, was _real_.

This also wasn't a ritual meant for two, or three, or more. No, not in the least.

_A private ceremony for the thinning of the veil between this world and the next. When it becomes necessary to converse with those who have journeyed beyond the reach of the blessed living, this ceremony can be conducted to allow the speaker to do so if they are greatly impacting local matters both in this world and those beyond, to assauge and rectify the concerns of those most powerful interests, or to control or restrict them should such dire efforts become necessary and all other attempts fail._

Private. _The_ speaker. --In context, every reference to the living on this side of the veil was singular.

This was a ritual meant for _one_.

There had been no talk of others in the continuing text. What there _had_ been, had been references to the sort of environment in which the ceremony ought to be conducted. Because the selection was important.

A quiet, private space; a thoughtful place. A place that could allow for intense concentration, one that was meaningful and wide and a little wild. Quiet and belonging to oneself. Wholly.

 _Not_ something borrowed.

Small wonder that Lana had failed.

 _She_ had had no business being here. This place was _his_.

 _She_ had thrown together only half of the required supplies listed in the grimoire.

 _She_ had wanted to 'talk' to only **one** particular ghost, through the dullest, most difficult means imaginable... for a ghost that couldn't impact the physical living world. Which meant that Lana hadn't _really_ wanted to talk to anyone at all -- those who had journeyed beyond, plural -- let alone strike up a honest-to-god two-way conversation _with_ them.

Small wonder that the voices had thought that _he_ was the intended medium trying to communicate with them. _He_ was the one actually open to the idea of all of this being real, after all. _He_ was the one who had taken it seriously. _He_ was the one who had thought communication would actually involve _talking with someone from the other side_.

 _He_ was the one who had respected the ceremony enough to feel fear.

_...This ceremony must not be conducted by one without the capability of a spiritual medium to facilitate communication, as the presence of such is essential to mediating--_

Lex stared down at the Ouija board for an age. His lip slowly curled up in a sneer, and he wasn't the only one jeering at it.

The text had been vague enough that at a glance it might seem as though the 'spiritual medium' was meant to be a crutch, some device, rather than an innate characterstic or inborn trait of the one conducting the ceremony, but with the number of times Lana must have had to have read over the text to be able to speak the later chants as well as she had...

Finally, he reached forward. Picked the board up. Weighed it in his hand, with narrowed eyes.

And tossed it aside.

The clatter it made against the floor as it was lost in the dark was swallowed up by the voices waiting at the edges of the light.

He didn't need it. He didn't _want_ it.

He wasn't Lana.

 _He_ wanted to have a real conversation with these voices, face-to-face. They hadn't really been listening to him before.

Not yet.

 _He_ was going to have a nice little chat with all of the bastards, because he knew _exactly_ what he wanted to say and he was damn well going to get the chance to speak his mind!

_I **will** be heard!_

His mouth twisted up into a rictus of a grin. Oh yes. He was _going_ to be heard.

Even if he had to force the issue.

~*~*~*~*~*~

It really was simplicity itself.

He was going to conduct the ceremony, as properly as he could with what Lana had originally used. _More_ properly, as he recognized some parts of the chants as Latin and some of the older dialects of Greek he had had to learn before he was able to understand the more ancient forms of the language. It had been near-incomprehensible when she'd spoken it.

Now, knowing what she _should_ have said? Her pronunciation of the correct sounds -- or lack thereof -- sent him shuddering.

He would conduct the entire ceremony, properly. Which ought to bind together with all of the previous ill-attempts. And, once he had finished, immediately upon its completion he would then perform the ritual in _reverse_ of what he had done, effectively undoing the entire 'spell'. Properly.

...And if that first stroke-of-brilliance idea didn't work, well, he'd thought up another few possibly-workable last-ditch efforts to attempt from reading the text of the grimoire.

Though with his reading for the moment, he closed the book, and folded it under an arm.

He paused for a moment, then turned in place and retrieved one of the candles that had previously been used in the ritual circle, only half-burnt down.

He lit it in the fireplace, then, thinking the better of it, set down both book and candle and doused the fire.

Which of course led to the voices in the room immediately increasing in number and intensity.

He nearly laughed to himself as he picked up those few items he'd grabbed and carried over with him and made his way back over to the ritual circle. He certainly had their attention now -- they could see him by the candlelight, after all!

It was almost worse than the previous night, except that he was used to it by now, so that the same had less of an impact this second time around.

It also helped that he knew now what he hadn't then; he had finally realized that they couldn't hear him yet. It was worse in a much different way to have his wishes ignored when it was done purposefully and with malicious intent. Not being able to be heard was a different thing altogether when the very nature of the 'veil' had apparently disallowed such a determination to have been made by the voices in the first place, as things stood.

He shivered slightly at the attention, but he told himself that he ought to have been used to it by now. Both from the dead, here, and the 'undead zombie' masses who read the gossip rags. The worst that those worst reporters put out didn't compare to--

\--to--

Lex suddenly realized that the voices -- those he had understood -- hadn't actually said far, far worse than anything he'd been hearing from reporters for nearly two decades, now that he thought on it and made the direct comparison. It had been the seemingly _nicer_ things said that had hurt the most, and he felt a little uneasy at the realization.

He decided that it must have more to do with the fact that he was an only child and simply unused to so many 'people' surrounding him in the house where he was living. And that he was a Luthor, so of course no-one meant anything nice they might ever say to him, but anyone still living had learned to keep their false kindness behind their teeth a long time ago for fear of reprisal from... well, _someone_ , obviously, perhaps his father in an attempt to discourage coddling and help toughen him up, what with him having so little emotional control... and so he had never become accustomed to ignoring the hurt that such false words could bring. And of course the impact of those words was probably such as it was because they were from _dead voices from beyond the grave_...

He felt a little lightheaded, and for a moment he wondered why he hadn't thought of any of this the previous night when he'd read through the ceremony once before with Clark...

...perhaps because he'd still been operating under false assumptions about the ceremony. He'd also been more focused on determining what had happened the previous night at the time, rather than the specifics of what was in the book on the ceremony itself. He'd been concerned with how it had been conducted and the end result, not how it ought to have been conducted and what the true result was supposed to have been when done properly. After all, the voices hadn't really started to bother him until...

\--But hadn't he heard the one voice the next afternoon when Chloe...? Hadn't that been before...?

His head spun and the world tilted dizzily for a moment.

Lex shook his head and promptly put it all out of his mind. He needed to focus.

Lex knelt down where Lana, and then Clark, and now he, had and were now sitting -- the position of power for the summoner in the ceremony.

He rearranged the materials about him, and then gingerly rearranged himself ito a cross-legged seated position on the cold, bare wooden floor.

He winced slightly, as he had no bell to accompany his book and candle, and no hair to sacrifice to the incense bowl to more effectively tie the ritual to himself as a more binding thing.

He opened the book in his lap, more for his own comfort than anything.

He shivered at the ever-increasing cold, and hoped that they all came like moths to his single candle-flame.

The electricity had been out, so there was nothing to drive any of them away.

The fireplace was out, so there was nothing to dwarf the attention of any of them, or mask his presence from them.

They should all be there, just outside the small circle of light thrown off by his candle, waiting and watching, and he ought to be able to get them all in one fell swoop.

His wandering through the mansion that afternoon ought to have garnered the attention from no small few. He ought to have run across any possible stragglers, given his routes, even if he hadn't been able to hear them earlier, under the heated bright stare of the sun.

...Although, he vaguely remembered being... He'd not been trying to stand out at all times, but rather the opposite, now that he thought about it...?

An uncontrollable shudder wracked Lex's frame, and he bent over his lap, hands clutching at his arms.

He... needed to get this over with. Soon.

If he took care of this tonight, he'd have the day Sunday to recover before he went back in to work on Monday. He couldn't afford much time away from LexCorp yet, not in these early days.

Swallowing heavily, Lex straightened, threw some of the bundle of herbs into the bowl, and lit the contents with the candle. He lifted the book in both hands.

He began.

...And after awhile, he slowly lowered the book, not looking down at its pages, or even glancing around at all. It was as though in his mind's eye, those words of the chants that he was yet to speak were painted in fire, up on a wall, burning letters hanging in midair that he could see, purple flame shot through with strands of sunlight-yellow, green and blue silver...

And they caught his attention and held it. He couldn't look away. ...He read it off easily.

His mouth, his tongue, felt strange. Not much time passed before they seemed to move of their own accord.

He was caught up in something, something powerful, going through some arcane set of proscribed motions as though he had no real choice in the matter.

Somehow, he couldn't work up the effort to care.

Instead, he felt calm. Because this was what he should be doing.

So he kept doing it.

He did what he was... supposed to do.

What... the book... bid him to do.

It felt strange, like fitting into a Lex-sized slot in reality. A cog in a larger machine, being turned and pushed by something more powerful than he, but also acting on all else in turn, that force moving through him but also shaped by him. He wasn't some passive puppet, he was...

Whole. A part of everything, and so... Complete.

The bells struck twelve in perfect syncopated tonal harmony with his voice, and when the twelfth bell struck...

The world went silent.

The moon went out.

The candle went out.

All was darkness.

Except for the eerie silvery-blue light emanating from the people surrounding him.

...It took Lex a moment to realize that _the candle had gone out._

He was struck with a cold chill as effective as being suddenly doused with a bucket of ice water. Everything snapped back into focus all-at-once, and _how the fuck was he supposed to undo the damn ceremony if he couldn't blow the candle out at the end?_ \--He was only supposed to light it at the beginning of the forward run, not the reverse!

A horde of not-so-very transparent ghosts stared down at him from all sides.

...Smallville. Of _course_ it couldn't be that simple. Damn this town.

Well, at least he could see the people to go with the voices, now.

\--And the voices were suddenly -- _again_ \-- no longer silent.

Lex winced and clenched his teeth as the entire multitude attempted to out-shout each other and give him the worst sort of headache. A throbbing pain took up residence between his temples.

He took in a breath.

He yelled out, meaning to get their quiet attention so he could speak with them in a more rational, proper discourse.

...His eyes went wide as he realized that yet again he was unable to voice a single sound.

He tried again, and again, to no avail.

He clutched at his throat, long fingers encircling cold flesh. His fingertips started to go numb as he sat shivering on the floor of his library-home in the midst of the screaming cold dead.

He started to feel desperate.

The expectations of so many people, so much anger and desperation and clamor for attention and just pure _want_ pressing in from all sides was making it hard to breathe.

He couldn't give them what they wanted. He couldn't make out one want from another. He couldn't give anybody what they wanted, least of all himself. He couldn't hear to think. He couldn't un-hear so he could think. He couldn't hear himself-- think-- think-- _THINK--!_

Lex bent in on himself, bowing under the pressure.

And then he got angry.

He felt the heat blossom up in him, and then outward suddenly to all his extremities, limbs filled to the brim -- all of him -- the cold completely pressed out of his skin.

In that moment, he became nothing more than anger and will.

And he wanted them to _**go away**_.

He felt his own _want_ almost **pulse** off of his skin, and he started in shock as it had an immediate effect.

The ghosts... all became angry-confused-scared-worried--

They also faded a bit.

Body, and... voice.

Lex sucked in a breath, a mad hope careening up out of him alongside the anger.

He took in a shuddering breath, and with his eyes half-lidded, and a face-splitting triumphant grin, _forced them to listen_.

 _ **GO AWAY!**_ he thought at them, hard, with every fibre of feeling in his being.

Their visible forms winked out like the blown out candle. Their voices were weakening.

Lex all-but-laughed and he shook in reaction and gleeful relief as he realized -- the book -- when all else was dire and had gone wrong, _control and restrict_ , and he wanted them _controlled and restricted_ all right --all the way back to the other side of the veil!

He was still shivering as he gathered himself to force them back, and away and gone for good, one last time, when a whisper of sound caught his notice.

He paused, holding his breath.

His head whipped around, trying to place it, because -- there, again! --but so much softer, he couldn't make it out...

It... it was...

He strained to hear... wanting to hear...

It was the _trusted_ voice from before.

He let out a shaky breath, unsure, and his anger wavered for a moment as he lost hold of it, briefly.

And in the space of a split-second a wild panic filled him up.

Because he suddenly _recognized_ that voice, finally, and--

Oh no.

No no.

No no no.

It-- _she_ \-- was fading out, and Lex could barely hear--

No, wait--

No, _wait_!

_**Don't leave!** _

_**Don't leave me!** _

Silence fell.

"No," Lex softly moaned out, hands grasping his head. "No, no."

The moonlight slowly filtered back in.

 _ **DON'T LEAVE ME HERE ALL ALONE!!**_ he cried out, heartsick and in deep rending emotional pain.

Silence.

The library was visible around him, bathed in silver-blue, hidden in grey-black.

Tears tracked down his cheeks.

He curled in on himself in despair.

Silence.

...

...For a moment.

And then Lex felt something _shift_ in the air around him... and he pushed himself upright as he abruptly realized his mistake. The trap.

The world spiraled away again, but this time back into a darkness that had never seen light, and he felt it leech every last erg of heat-filled fury straight out of the depths of him in the space of a breath.

It left him feeling empty. Open.

Defenseless.

Alone.

...Not for long.

And the pressure of expectation from before had been _nothing_ compared to this.

Between one thought and the next he found himself being physically _compressed_ , bones straining under an outside force. He couldn't move, was only able to _feel_ what his unconscionable error had wrought on him as he was twisted and _wrenched_ from the outside in around and about a solid core of _something_ within him, but he wasn't strong enough to--

A roaring, spiraling mess of force-rage-sound-possessiveness-want-fury slammed down into him from all sides, everything held at bay was no longer.

Lex felt his physical body collapse, flattened against the floor--

~*~*~*~*~*~


	4. Sunday, November 3, 2002 -- Coda, When we meet again, Standing in the sun...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex felt... light.

He was lightheaded, yes, but he also felt light falling upon him. Sunlight.

Warm sunlight.

Lex slitted his eyes open slowly. It was morning. He was curled up on the floor of the library in the middle of a mess.

It looked like the room had been trashed again.

There was noise around him.

Not the voices, though. Not like before.

He wondered what had happened.

"Lex?" he heard, but it didn't really register; something else did.

He was deathly cold, though the sunlight was slowly warming him.

He was breathing in small little pants. He felt like a summer bird, caught in snow, slowly freezing to death.

Or maybe unfreezing painfully in someone's cupped warm, gentle hands.

Clark had warm hands.

"Lex?"

Lex blinked lazily.

But Clark wasn't here.

And there was nothing warm or gentle about this floor.

"Lex?"

Lex slowly sat up, feeling lightheaded and a little groggy.

_But I didn't drink anything last night..._

Slowly, trickles of memory began to seep back in.

"Lex?" he heard a trusted, familiar, _known_ voice say.

Lex gasped and abruptly shoved himself backwards. He banged into the front of the couch hard, but he didn't really care; it hardly registered as he tilted his head back, looked up, and--

"...Mom?" he breathed out, eyes widening.

Because Lillian Luthor was standing there in front of him, solid as anything in the room, maybe even a little more so.

"Alexander," she said, but the rest was drowned out by a bustle around him, and noise that he couldn't quite make out even if he cared to, and his own happiness bubbling up out of him in a smile of perfect, complete joy, wide and wild and utterly bereft of worry.

"Son?" he heard, and he dragged his gaze away from his mother to focus on his father, crouching down in front of him.

Oh! --Oh, his father was going to be so _happy_ , now that Lex had brought her back, they'd all be together again, it had all been worth it--!

" _Dad_ ," Lex said, grinning and reaching up to touch him, and happy to tell, because he couldn't see, right? He might not remember her voice right away, either, and-- "Mom, she--! She's--!"

"It's all right, son," his blind father told him soothingly, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Everything is going to be all right."

"Yes," Lex agreed, feeling as if a weight had been lifted off of him, because it would be, of _course_ it would be, now that mom was--

Lex felt an odd prick on the back of his neck.

He winced, and gasped slightly. And then he felt even more lightheaded.

He reached a shaking, unsteady hand up to finger the small wound. Slowly frowned in confusion. Turned towards Lionel Luthor. Uncertainly opened his mouth to ask.

"...Dad--?"

And then a different sort of darkness rose up to meet him...

~*~*~*~*~*~


End file.
